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Law
Law is the codified public conscience, a product of social mentality that civilized the world replacing fistfight by an argument of what is right. As long as the pugnacious sensation is alive in the nerves, the mind does not think and no law can be born. It is true not only the victor, but also the vanquished. This is a way of life where emotions grow hot and do not subside unless they are spent. One universal rule is that it takes a very very long time for such heat to cool down. In Indian mythological, God destroyed a human incarnation of evil taking the form of a lion, and then it took six months for his anger to subside. Before reaching the Mind the body has to pass through the energy of the vital. How is Law born? A negative member of a community, who harms it, does not stop his harm by advice, or threats or even corporal punishment. He stops only when he is killed by someone else. This is the experience. Long after, maybe centuries, the community achieves the same compliance from its deviant members when the collective decides on the punishment. Perception of this phenomenon as a fact was the beginning of Law. The collective discovers that its word is law. The capacity of the collective to award punishment deters the entire community from acts injurious to it. Law was born when the will of the community acquired ultimate power. There is a distance between will and conscience. Human will, individual or collective, can be used vindictively. As long as the will prevails, the erring individual or one accused of erring is subject to the whim of the collective, not to justice. Only when the collective conscience is well formed does Law have any scope. But now the collective is poised to create law. Laying down a law is a mental act. It takes a longer time or a greater experience of the mind with events in which human propensities express diverse capacities to generate the material needed to formulate law. Codification is not only an act of the community, but it is its mental act. But codification is an act of the administrative mind of the collective. The collective, even when it is right, can be crude or clumsy. The administration is a structure. It acts within the limits of structure. Having codified the will of the people, the administration must be at great pains to convince the monarch who is often a dull brute. To convince him of the reality of the law, the administration has another delicate task to perform. It cannot offend his vanity or even pride. The monarch may love to be just, but his own inner urges impel him to enjoy the crude expression of the brute strength. Only law, which passes this test, survives. Even here the implementation of law will err on the side of the king’s brutality. To stem that tide, over the years, through every experience procedures have to be designed and the collective must wait for the king to offer his ultimate sanction by adherence to it. For this law to be implemented by the lower orders of the administration, it must be converted into rules. Rules vary with events, regions, persons and milieu. The first occasion when the European world codified a law that was sustaining was the Roman Law. To this day it is that law that rules the world. In India, laws were mostly based on tradition, as the constitution is unwritten in Britain. Category:Development